Merge of lists of project from Nic30/* repositories

[Nic30]

Hello,

I would like to remove the lists from my projects and replace them with a link on your awesome page.
There is a problem however, the awesome lists are not supposed to be junkyard but it is hard to judge the projects and I do not have an authority to do so. That is why it would be nice to have some place (possibly section in this awesome list) where any link can be posted.

Originally I was thinking that the things will get merged to drom/awesome-hdl @drom (I had the impression that others did agree.), can someone enlighten me to the current situation?

[umarcor]

Hi @Nic30! Nice to see you around!

There is a problem however, the awesome lists are not supposed to be junkyard but it is hard to judge the projects and I do not have an authority to do so.

While this is true, I believe that issue is partially less relevant in this case. Precisely, the idea of using a file for each item instead of putting everything in the same single markdown list, was allowing having metadata about each project. Each item is linked to a discussion in the repo, so that users can react and "vote" on the projects. That is not integrated in the frontend yet, but you can see the prototype in vhdl.github.io/news.

In practice, many projects do only have the minimal information. That is because the initial and still main motivation of this site is that the maintainers/developers/authors of each tool should be interested in having the information about their projects updated and in the descriptions being attractive as well as accurate. We didn't get as many as we'd like engaged yet, but some have already contributed interesting info and cross-relations.

So, this repository is a reflection of the interest that the (open source) hardware community puts into building bridges and sharing knowledge with each other. It is not the duty of a few people to have a detailed and perfectly organised site. In other words: there is "junk" in the community, but some junk is actually useful albeit not attractive.

Nevertheless, I agree with the difficulty for judging projects. None of us have any authority for deciding and, at the same time, all of us have authority to do so. Personally, I won't oppose to almost any project being added. However, I suggest the following:

• Try not to add your own projects. Wait for some other to do it.
• If some project is too small/new, I suggest grouping them per author/organisation/community.
  • Avoid each RISC-V core or small bunch of HDL cores to be added as independent items. There are OpenCores, LibreCores, etc. for that. But I would not like those refs to be lost. So, it's ok to e.g., have a single item which is a list of open source RISC-V/OpenPower cores (CPUs, or CPU based SoCs).
• The criteria I use is waiting until some other people (2-3) which are not in my closest bubble do also like a project. Then, it's awesome enough.

That is why it would be nice to have some place (possibly section in this awesome list) where any link can be posted.

It's ok to create either Discussions or Issues for those items which you don't feel strong enough to be added as items to the site, but which you would like to have a place for. In fact, in vhdl.github.io/news the items are created from the issues in the repository. Anyone can post a new by opening an issue and tagging it. We might apply that same strategy in this repository. That is, have an specific section in the site which lists "other items", meaning the issues with some specific tag.

Originally I was thinking that the things will get merged to drom/awesome-hdl @drom (I had the impression that others did agree.), can someone enlighten me to the current situation?

I/we did not have explicit feedback/communication with Aliaksei. For context, this organisation and repository were created a year ago, as an extension of vhdl/awesome-vhdl, after some discussions in the gitter channels of the open source vhdl group. For several months, it didn't get much attention. Last autumn, we decided to move containers, add MSYS2 packages, move Conda repos, etc. Since then, we use the items as the single entrypoint to the content about each tool. So, we've been adding items as we needed to have them referenced somewhere (some docs, slides for presentations, etc.). Precisely, @rodrigomelo9 contributed a lot because he gave some talks in february and then used this site as a posterior reference for attendees to use.

Since this repository grew in the last months, Patrick and I decided to archive vhdl/awesome-vhdl some days ago. You can see he opened some issues here for tracking the remaining items which are still to be added as independent markdown files. Therefore, I think this might be a good time to suggest @drom considering the "migration" of drom/awesome-hdl here. Yet, I would understand if he wants to maintain the simpler and more common format of awesome lists.

[Nic30]

Thank you for an explanation, this project is a little different than I was originally thinking. Thankfully it is better, which surprises me considering it is 2021.

I am using these lists to monitor similar projects and help them. That is why I am adding everything related which does at least something.

Also I see another problem which could be potentially solved by this project.
There is lack of information about new projects which significantly reduces the possibility that the useful things will ever see the light of day.

One of my personal experiences:

The probability that the project appears in the list corresponds to a number of users. Which naturally favors the strongest players and obliterates small unique projects. I do represent only 3 PhD students and working programmers from ruins of soviet union (CZ) we do not have any money nor the time for marketing and our publications are not focused on this topic. Which means we are short on possibilities and any of our projects can never dream of being in this list because no one else even knows about it. Naturally we are working on our projects because we did not find any equivalent which we could use. And it usually happens that after some period of time someone else do exactly the same thing and he/she convinces whole community to contribute and then only a fragment of functionality which we had year ago is implemented and then the development suddenly stops. So we are practically forced to maintain our library and other is still missing something important which can not be implemented in other library because of API change which is not acceptable as the library is widely used.

For an example back in 2018 I did not know about netlistsvg and I wrote d3-hwschematic, When I found netlistsvg it did not have support for hierarchical components so I was not able to use it. Then things like interactivity, support for hierarchical interfaces, filters etc. were added into d3-hwschematic which made netlistsvg entirely deprecated and I was thinking that the project is dead.
But then people from SymbiFlow and others started pushing into the project and they are slowly getting it on the level of d3-hwschematic. But that is just the beginning, they are working on netlistsvg because they are working on sphinxcontrib-hdl-diagrams but sphinx-hwt does even more for 3 years. And so on...

With previous two paragraphs I would like to say that knowledge about projects in progress is very important.
In our case the knowledge about our project is maybe not so important because we traditionally have the worst doc imaginable but for other projects and community cooperation this could be very well be the most important thing.

Actually, maybe we should add something like badges or some other branch of taxonomy which describes the development state of a project, or even better some visuals which will describe the state of CI, last commit etc.

I think that in that way it could be possible to add just about anything as things will be shown filtered.